Simone Weil was born in France in 1909 into a non-observant Jewish household. A trained philosopher, she combined teaching philosophy within the French school system with offering classes to French workers. She would take breaks from teaching to work on the production line in French factories so as to understand firsthand the conditions faced by the working class.
Weil merged her philosophy with a rigorous personal commitment to solidarity with those she perceived as suffering in any way. Despite the extreme challenges she set for herself to demonstrate that solidarity, her physical constitution was not robust, and she was susceptible to spells of illness, enduring debilitating headaches for most of her life. With the outbreak of the Second World War, she was displaced onto the refugee trails of Europe — along with fellow philosophers Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin — journeying from Paris to Marseille, to a refugee camp in Casablanca, then to New York, and finally, London.
After a period working with the Free French, she died in England in 1943, at the age of 34, from complications related to tuberculosis. The majority of her work was published posthumously.
Simone Weil (1909–1943) in Marseilles in the early 1940s. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Weil’s early political-philosophical writings were characterised by a radical commitment to resisting oppression, advocating for dignified industrial and rural work, and embracing a modernity that prioritised human dignity over profit motives. She shared a critique of industrial work with Karl Marx but was highly sceptical of his faith in the liberating force of history. For Weil, Marx’s belief in salvation through class struggle aligns with economic liberalism’s faith in salvation through market forces and fascism’s reliance on the supremacy of a chosen race — each representing modernity’s recurring error: the belief that we can be saved by force in any of its various forms.
Our task, Weil insisted, is to resist this historical use of force in its endlessly regenerating manifestations by proposing an alternative political logic grounded in love and oriented towards justice. This is the love and justice to which the Gospel testifies, and which begins with the act of looking those who suffer in the face.
A series of experiences culminating in a 1938 visit to a Benedictine abbey led to Weil’s embrace of Christ. Nonetheless, her Christianity remained unconventional. She resisted baptism while drawing others to it, and her Christian belief focused more heavily on the cross than the resurrection. Weil felt a paradoxical pull towards the church — finding in it solace, beauty and truth — while also fearing the “society” of the church, which, like other collectivities, she believed had the potential to enact violence and harm in the name of belief and belonging.
Yet, this same frail, slight, luminous woman became a thinker whose posthumously published notebooks, essays and monographs would influence countless Catholics, including several popes. Her notebooks became prized possessions of Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, the latter of whom credited Weil as one of his most significant intellectual influences. Moreover, her writings also foreshadowed the treatment of work in John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens.
Here, however, I don’t want to focus on the well-thumbed spiritual notebooks, but rather on The Need for Roots, the product of the last frenetic year of her life. I realise that I cannot hope to achieve more than outlining the contours of Weil’s account of rootedness and uprootedness, but I trust it will be sufficient to demonstrate the echoes her work finds in Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti.
Our need for roots
Simone Weil’s clearest articulation of the human person’s need for roots was written during the time of her greatest personal upheaval in 1942–43, as a refugee in London. The Need for Roots begins with a startling rejection of Catholic rights-personalism. In a separate essay (“What is Sacred in Every Human Being?”), she presents a more extensive rebuttal of Jacques Maritain’s personalism, advocating for what she refers to as an “impersonal” politics of human obligation in response to human moral and material needs. In Roots, she begins with the assertion that while rights remain important, they must be understood as logically subordinate and relative to obligations.
She presents rights as relative to obligations in the following manner: a right without recognition is ineffective, a conditional entity that is meaningless unless acknowledged, whereas an obligation remains effective and unconditional regardless of its recognition. An obligation retains all its moral strength even if ignored. Weil positions these obligations within the “domain of what is eternal, universal and unconditional”. Divine will underpins them, and we either accept or reject them. Thus, obligations lack a foundation in an immanent sense, existing only as a “verification”, “in the common consent accorded by the universal consciousness”.
Since we do not establish but verify obligations, we, as human beings, cannot annul, amend or eradicate them. The most fundamental obligation we are compelled to honour is to respect the human person as such, grounded in the eternal destiny of humanity. The only way to enact this respect meaningfully is by addressing genuine, conditioned human needs — this is where the recognition of rights becomes significant.
Roots explores these conditioned human needs in depth. These needs encompass both material (physical) and moral (spiritual) dimensions, with each category being comparable to the most fundamental material necessity — food in response to hunger. A person’s moral or spiritual needs include: order and freedom, obedience and initiative, responsibility, equality and hierarchy, honour and punishment, freedom of expression and opinion, security and risk, private property and participation in communal goods, truth and, ultimately, rootedness.
This list culminates in Weil’s central claim that rootedness is the most significant yet difficult to define spiritual need of the human person, and the least recognised or valued. She then offers a luminous communitarian definition of rootedness that (as a plot spoiler) sounds strikingly similar to a paragraph we will encounter later in Fratelli Tutti:
A human being is rooted through their real, active and natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future. This participation is natural in that it stems automatically from place, birth, occupation and those around them. Every human being needs to have multiple roots and to derive almost all their moral, intellectual and spiritual life from the environment to which they naturally belong.
Roots illustrates how cultural rootedness necessitates openness to an external world and the exchange of gifts. Using the image of a painter visiting a museum who experiences not a desire to copy or homogenise, but an aspiration for intensified originality in their work, Weil clarifies that the exchange of influences between milieus is integral to the health of a rooted collectivity and the needs of the individual within it. By analogy with the painter, this exchange should not result in a culture-by-addition or a gradual homogenisation, but rather in a process of inner renewal that reconnects a culture with its multiple sources.
Crucially, this renewal process only occurs with openness to other milieus: much like aspects of Alasdair MacIntyre’s arguments about virtue, the interior health of communities relies on a degree of exteriority. In Weilian terms, rootedness depends for its vitality and endurance on receptivity and engagement with otherness and exchange.
Deracinating modernity
This vision of rootedness stands in stark contrast to the uprooting, deracinating dynamics of modernity, which draw us away from this conception of the good.
Weil identifies the evident uprooting forces of military conquest and colonisation, along with forms of economic colonisation that, though lacking territorial conquest, still displace exploited populations. Additionally, she highlights two internal drivers of uprootedness within communities: the prioritisation of money as a value above others, and an increasingly pragmatic and technocratic view of education, which becomes a fragmenting and uprooting force stripped of genuine culture or authentic formative power.
Cultures that lack an orientation — particularly through education and the arts — to transcendent and metaphysical questions of destiny and truth detach their inhabitants from the fundamental points of orientation regarding the past, present and future. She concludes her examination of these themes by noting that uprootedness is “by far the most dangerous disease of human societies because it propagates itself”.
She accordingly warns that propagated uprootedness leaves only two options: either uprooted individuals succumb to the inertia of the soul, or they “throw themselves into an activity that … uproots … often by the most violent methods, those who are not yet, or are only partially, uprooted”.
Rural uprootedness
Central to Weil’s account of rootedness is her critique of the urbanisation of thought, which uproots it from rural knowledge, traditions and ways of living, as well as separates thought from the practice of living and working the land.
A recurring theme in The Need for Roots is the relationship between urbanisation, enlightenment and secularisation as an unholy Trinity that detaches both rural dwellers and the economically marginalised from true religion. Laïcité, or secularisation, is perceived as a poison to French rural life, while urbanisation is regarded as displacing rural populations and the most economically disadvantaged, moving them away from religious sentiments, truths and practices in favour of notions of progress, status and wealth that erode connectedness, mutual dependence and consideration for individuals as inhabitants of land, in time and space.
It is worth noting that these connections are being reiterated in our time by prominent Black theologians and philosophers — I think particularly of Willie James Jennings. This would not have surprised Simone Weil, given the connection she intimates in Roots between the logic of colonialism and this trio of disconnection from land, place and community.
A spirituality of work
At the heart of Weil’s account of uprootedness lie two primary concerns: work and the nation-state. In a manner that resonates with both existing and subsequent Catholic Social Thought, Weil articulates a concern regarding the uprooting effects of modern industrial work. She writes:
a civilisation built on a spirituality of work would be the highest degree of rootedness of humanity in the universe, consequently the opposite of our current situation, which consists in an almost total uprootedness. It is therefore, by definition, the aspiration that is commensurate with our suffering.
Weil identifies the need to restore what she terms a “spirituality of work” as the “vocation of our era”. She believes that the gestures and actions constituting work should be reconnected to the movement and operation of thoughts and theories that guide our social existence, and that such theories, to nourish souls, must relate work to the “dual beauty” of this world and the next.
She argues that this renewed understanding of the spirituality of work represents the only genuinely novel contribution that modern thought can offer to its time. We do not inherit a sufficient theory or spirituality of work from the Greeks, Romans or the medieval period. This is a distinctly modern endeavour, inspired by the economic prevalence of wage labour. She observes that this vocation, for which the responsibility of articulation lies upon our shoulders, “is the only thing substantial enough to offer to the people instead of totalitarian idols”.
She reflects on our failure to recognise that hungry people do not merely crave food, but that we “need greatness even more than bread”. She asserts that, while we understand our desire for butter over guns, an inexplicable fatality compels people to choose guns, despite themselves. The challenge in confronting the allure of totalitarianism lies in presenting genuine greatness rather than counterfeit greatness, which she describes as “the old lie of conquering the world”. Conquest, she states, “is the ersatz for greatness”.
However, Weil also warns that the spirituality of work must not degenerate into merely a motto or formula tainted by being transformed into “a cause, a movement, or even a regime”. The peril of our age is that we fabricate lies from words and causes, stripping them of their meaning. This arises from a context that is so “poisoned with lies that it turns everything it touches into a lie”.
The dilemma, then, is how to promote this vocation to articulate a spirituality of work, linking the reality of labour with the structure of thought and connecting us to both material and divine existence without harming ourselves or the endeavour. To evade this responsibility out of risk or fear would be to neglect the duty of our time.
Collectivities and love of country
From work, Weil transitions to the domain of collectivity and nation. She writes: “There is another form of uprootedness still that needs to be analysed to gain a basic understanding of our main disease. And that is uprootedness … relating to collectivities.”
Ultimately, Weil feared that modernity denoted an era marked by the decline of collectivities and the rise of the nation and state. It is essential to note that Weil distinguishes between what she terms “the collectivity” and “the nation”. She regards collectivities with the utmost reverence, asserting that we owe them a significant level of respect due to their role in linking the past, present and future:
- Each collectivity has its roots in the past — “It is the sole repository for the spiritual treasures amassed by the dead.”
- Each has value in the present, is unique, and if destroyed, cannot be replaced — “The food a collectivity gives its members’ souls has no equivalent anywhere in the entire universe.”
- By virtue of its endurance, a collectivity engages with the future, offering “food … for the souls of unborn beings”.
However, Weil confines the respect owed to the collectivity within a specified context. By way of analogy, she asserts: “Even when a total sacrifice is demanded, a collectivity is never owed anything other than a respect on par with that owed to food.” She warns that some collectivities invert this dynamic — “instead of serving food”, they “consume souls”. There are also dead collectivities that neither consume nor nourish souls.
Weil attempts to distinguish between to whom and what respect or loyalty is owed. She believes that modernity increasingly manifests a confusion of categories regarding the good. Collectivities are necessary realities with the capacity to contribute meaningfully to the good, and loyalty and respect are owed to them. However, in her system, the state and the nation are not owed equivalent respect or loyalty. Nevertheless, she does not reject all forms of patriotism but rather reframes what ethical patriotism might look like in its “clearly defined, limited, place”. She also accepts that a nation can be a type of collectivity. The issue arises when the necessarily plural forms of collectivity are suppressed and replaced by a single dominating form, which transforms patriotic pride into propaganda and imposes “duty”.
Weil argued that modernity has invented a dangerous form of patriotism which, unlike its diffuse, nebulous and shifting pre-modern predecessor — sometimes focused on a village, town, city, multi-territorial empire, the public, or a prince or king — revolves around “a permanent, concrete object of patriotic sentiment” that identifies a single territory and structure with patriotic duty. In her strongest statement on the subject, Weil observes that, in an age when collectivities diminish and the state ascends:
The state is a cold thing that cannot be loved, but it kills and abolishes everything that could be loved, so we are forced to love it because that is all there is. Such is the moral torment of our contemporaries.
Resistance to this deracination is incredibly difficult, yet absolutely necessary.
Religion is not merely a solution in her account, however; it is both predictably embedded in the problem and necessary as a pathway out. She argues that the uprootedness of religion itself paves the way for total loyalty to the nation or state. Her case is that the privatisation of religion has transformed it into a matter of personal disposition and individual conscience — or, in the disdainful words of Weil, “of choice, opinion, taste … like choosing a tie”, neutering religion as a public thing, removing it from the realms of loyalty, obligation and authority.
Just as territorial entities such as villages, towns, cities and ethnic and linguistic groupings have lost their similar character, so too has religion been downgraded and surpassed. Only the nation-state remains, singular in its ability to claim entitlement to loyalty, obligation and authority — without an equal, without a higher power, and therefore without a legitimate public challenger. Because we naturally desire to feel and express loyalty to something, we cling to the nation. Ultimately, what emerges in the most extreme cases is what Weil calls “[i]dolatry without love: what could be sadder or more monstrous?”
A lengthy section of Roots is dedicated to patriotism within the context of French history. This is followed by a proposal for a patriotism that embodies a rightly ordered loyalty to the collective and addresses the soul’s need to offer loyalty and make sacrifices for the public good. As always, Weil seeks to construct her argument through analogy, paradox and contrast. The analogy that exemplifies constructive and limited patriotism as a legitimate desire of the person can be drawn from the pure love a parent feels for a child or that an adult child feels for an elderly and vulnerable parent or spouse. The notion of weakness, the precious fragility of “a perishable thing”, engenders a rightly ordered love:
Compassion for vulnerability is always bound up with love for true beauty because we feel acutely that truly beautiful things should be guaranteed eternal life, but are not.
While she has described the state as a “cold” entity, she conversely employs the language of “warmth” to depict this affection for the fragile, perishable life of the collective or country.
In contrast to patriotism, which aspires to “national greatness” and “strength”, Weil’s version is grounded in an awareness of weakness, directed towards a greatness of spirit that manifests as protective compassion — as she puts it, loving “a thing which, being earthly, can be destroyed, and is, therefore, all the more precious”. This stands in opposition to a love of vainglory that seeks merely “extended life”, conquest or immortality. Compassion can express itself in both particular and universal ways; vainglory for national greatness, conversely, is “exclusive by nature and non-transferable”.
Guided by love expressed as compassion, the patriot can confront historical failures and complicity without flinching, Weil writes, “with eyes open to the injustices, cruelties, errors, lies, crimes, and disgraces contained in the past, the present”. In contrast, the love of one’s country, “right or wrong”, elevates the nation above moral scrutiny, creating an absolute value that makes it impossible to both love one’s country and serve justice.
This latter model of patriotism places human obligations in tension where none need exist, revealing itself as a deracinated thought. Examining the nation’s failures poses no threat to a genuine love of country because, if compassion serves as the guiding emotional and moral force, then “crime itself is a reason not to move away but to go closer, to share, not the guilt, but the shame”. She adds: “Compassion is alert to both good and evil and finds reasons to love in both.” What is at stake for modernity is the need “to change our way of loving our country”.
Interestingly, here it is entirely appropriate for a Christian to love their country in this way, without conflict, for her vision is rooted in a Christian notion of caritas, or charity, which animates compassion and seeks a just patriotism in a manner that “gives the poorest section of the people a privileged moral place”. For Weil, this stimulus must exist “not only in troubled times”. Christ serves as her model for the disposition of the citizen in relation to their country: “men’s crimes did not diminish Christ’s compassion”.
Politics as art, politics as attention
Weil employs the idea of politics as an art form. Like other arts, politics is “an art governed by multi-layered composition”. True art represents participation in goodness and truth, striving not to mimic other artists but to pursue a kind of perfection. The ultimate aim of politics, the perfection it seeks to participate in, is justice. Just as no great artist attains their status by seeking to imitate anything less than perfection — which can, paradoxically, never be reached — so no true politician achieves anything genuine and enduring in the realm of justice without having transcendent goodness and justice in view.
All lasting art is a multi-layered composition, simultaneously crafted as “repetition and novelty” and “a unique intuition of beauty giving unity to the whole”. This highly demanding creative labour is made possible by “a tension of the faculties of the soul that makes possible the degree of attention that is indispensable” for composition. Weil observes that the “mode of political action” she discusses in Roots necessitates “a high degree of attention, of a similar order to that demanded by creative thinking in art and science”.
Conversely, the factors that hinder our capacity for attention and multi-layered political composition can be summarised as four obstacles to achieving a worthy civilisation. These obstacles are: “Our false conception of greatness; the deterioration of our sense of justice; our idolatry of money; and the absence within us of any religious inspiration.”
Weil’s final incisive critique targets what she refers to as modernity’s uprooting “phenomenon of the leader” — a phenomenon that, she observes, “has arisen everywhere and surprises so many”. It arises from a paradox: as the modern state reveals its coldness, in our longing for warmth, we inadvertently contribute to the rise of unworthy leaders. She writes:
At present, in every country, in every cause, there is a man to whom personal loyalty is pledged. The need to embrace the steely coldness of the state has made people, by contrast, avid to love something made of flesh and blood. This phenomenon is not about to end, and, however disastrous the consequences have been so far, it may still have some very painful surprises in store for us because the famous Hollywood art of creating stars out of any human material means that anyone can offer themselves for the adoration of the masses.
Pope Francis and our need for a “better politics”
Eighty years after Simone Weil wrote The Need for Roots, Pope Francis released his encyclical Fratelli Tutti. For not the first time, his pen produces a document with distinctly Weilian overtones. In my opinion, these are evident in his examination of the nature of a political culture that has lost its way, as well as in his discussion of migration and the appeal for rooted yet open communities. The specifically Weilian tropes present in his encyclical, whether by chance or design, include: his reflections on the severed connections between past, present and future; the uprooting nature of an age characterised by massified and homogenised culture; the crisis of attention; and a refusal to engage with sites of suffering in the name of well-being, alongside the hollowing out of political language of meaning. Let me outline a few basic connections that I perceive.
Pope Francis begins his 2020 encyclical on the social and political issues of our age with a reflection on St. Francis’s visit to the Sultan. The document opens with clear Christian social doctrine: in Christ, we are a new society, a newly ordered body, relating to one another in the knowledge and economy of God’s love, and called to share love, caritas, as the fundamental and highest bond that connects us to other creatures. The name for the social and political relationship among human beings is fraternity (in languages other than English, it tends to be a less male-centric term), a kinship relationship through Christ; the practice accompanying this naming is social friendship. Fratelli Tutti identifies peace as the sign of this healthy societas, and, echoing Weil’s themes in critiquing theories of social force, highlights the spiritual discipline of Christian social life as a rejection of the desire for domination that pervades political communities. This is the sign and witness that Christians aspire to offer to society.
In later paragraphs of Fratelli Tutti, Francis presents his own analysis of the uprootedness of an age — he uses the term “uproot” — lamenting a world characterised by massified social interests and weakened communal belonging. He expresses concern over the loss of historical consciousness, which particularly uproots young people from their connection to the past, present and future. He denounces the dilution of significant political terms, such as justice and democracy, which are losing their meanings. He addresses the marketisation of politics, creating an increasingly hollow space devoid of serious debate.
Pope Francis also touches upon the interconnectedness of our social crises, identifying loneliness, fear and insecurity (to which we might perhaps add social shame) as realities that provide fertile ground for manipulative political operators, from mafias to national leaders. Such operators serve up the thin gruel of “a false communitarian mystique” in response to the hunger for a genuine social and political community. Deepening his meditation on uprootedness — and sounding at his most purely Weilian — Francis writes:
there is no worse form of alienation than to feel uprooted, belonging to no one. A land will be fruitful, and its people bear fruit and give birth to the future, only to the extent that it can foster a sense of belonging among its members, create bonds of integration between generations and different communities, and avoid all that makes us insensitive to others and leads to further alienation.
The constructive alternative lies in social friendship as a practice of genuine, practical, rooted universalism. This represents a call for universalism that emerges from a distinct Christian humanism, recognising rootedness in place and social relationships as the ground of universalism. Openness to relationships and encounters, alongside a desire to move beyond oneself into deeper communion, are its hallmarks.
In this context, Pope Francis, like Weil, gently critiques human rights discourse that fails to embed discussions of rights within social and anthropological contexts, and in the nexus of relationships and order itself according to some defined notion of the good. Francis does, later in the document, revisit the question of rights to affirm that rights are without borders and that peoples, not just individuals, are bearers of rights.
Image: Shutterstock
Francis thereby continues his distinctive reflection on migration and the common good, emphasising the reciprocity of relationships and the necessary focus on the rootedness of cultures that demands the openness of cultures. A dynamic relationship exists between rootedness and openness to encounter and integration. He here extends his reflection on the dialectic of the local and universal, which was first presented in his exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. A true valuation of the local serves as the foundation for proper universalism, which is never abstract or detached from the particular value of place, culture, locality, land and people. He identifies the twin dangers within political communities that either embrace a narcissism of local or national identity or adopt a false universalism that disregards rootedness and place. The theme of “everything is connected”, which Pope Francis has embraced, leads him to assert that in our times, “we are either all saved together or no one is saved”.
In the section dedicated to “a better politics”, Francis presents a vision of politics always connected to caritas, or love, reiterating Catholic teaching in this regard and noting a Thomistic view of politics as the highest calling. The text seeks to elucidate the distinction between a closed, demagogic populism that lacks genuine concern for the vulnerable and offers a false, insular vision of community centred on the leader’s personality, thereby denying both dignity and meaningful rights for all. He outlines the dual risks of a liberalism that fails to comprehend community and a populism that exploits that very desire. He reinstates physical hunger and decent employment at the very heart of the challenges that nation-states must confront.
Francis thus urging nations to lead rather than merely follow in the wake of markets, asserting that employment issues are “the biggest issue” to address. Social movements and civil society are integral to the “moral energy” that empowers state politics to tackle real solutions to these problems.
One could argue that the politics of rootedness is fast becoming a defining political drama of our age. Pope Francis and Simone Weil offer strikingly parallel reflections on this theme. Neither completes for us the work of reflecting on the rooting and uprooting forces of our time, but they provide some tools to assist us in an intellectual and practical labour that, in the interests of a truly common good, surely lies urgently in front of us.
Anna Rowlands is the St. Hilda Professor of Catholic Social Thought and Practice at Durham University. She is the author of Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times.
Reproduced with permission by ABC Religion & Ethics, 1 April 2025.
